Ars Poetica

I'm making these serial Youtube videos, reading my long poem... but I suppose I'm the very opposite of a performance artist. With a contemporary performance artist, or spoken word poet, or such, the PERFORMANCE - the video, the scene, the show - is ALL : the text is merely a script. With me, on the other hand, you have (on film) only the ghost of a text. You have to READ the poem (slowly, carefully) in order to get it. To "get" it.

Does this mean I align myself with postmodern textual obsessions, "language" games? Is the presence of the author, the speaker, displaced or disembodied or rendered ambivalent etc. by the controlling "text"? No. Rather, the text is a test, a trial, a labyrinth, by way of which everything is directed toward living, breathing, PRESENCE. It's not dissembling, it's not hermetic - it's personal. It's hide & seek. I write for readers.